Barack Obama

Earlier this week, the team from Zambia won the Africa Cup of Nations soccer tournament.  The Zambian side, known as the Chipolopolo, or Copper Bullets, were an underdog in the 16 team field.  Their victory over the heavily-favored Cote d'Ivoire side was a thrilling enough outcome, but that it happened in Libreville, Gabon, where a generation earlier Zambia's entire national team had been wiped out in an airplane crash proved to be nothing short of a national catharsis.

The rhetoric coming out of the Republican presidential primary candidates would have you believe that President Barack Obama is actively engaged in a foreign policy whose sole purpose is to weaken America's standing on the global stage.  This is, of course, nonsense.  But it also hides the fact that Obama has been rather consistently engaged in a foreign policy strategy followed by the hero of the Republican Right, Ronald Reagan, who himself was following a policy originally laid down by Pres. Harry S Truman.

Ultima Ratio Regum Latin for “[War,] the last argument of kings,” this quote summed up the classical approach to warfare, that it was the method of achieving a specific strategic goal of the realm when other methods had failed. In modern times though, it seems that war is often the result of a chain of political miscalculations by heads of state. Such is the situation with Iran and the United States, where armed conflict seems more and more likely the eventual outcome of our current diplomatic standoff.

There are times where I find myself wondering how so many people in a society could collectively be asking the wrong questions. How is it possible for such a vast majority to so completely miss the point? This occurrence used to be rare, but is now becoming more common place. I realize the world is indeed a complicated place, and we are never going to have it all figured out. Yet there has to be a point where at least someone in the crowd notices we have been looking at a situation all wrong…right?

Texas governor and newly-minted presidential candidate Rick Perry recently made headlines by holding a quasi-religious service in Houston which drew an estimated crowd of 30,000.  Perry called on the crowd to engage in prayer and fasting as a spiritual commitment designed to make God a bigger presence in their lives.

The question of how and when the United States ought to be involved in international conflicts, particularly those in which we are not directly implicated, has long been a matter of fierce debate among Americans. The catalyst for its current place at the forefront of public discourse seems to have been our decision to involve ourselves in the Libyan conflict. This decision has been especially contentious as it played out in the midst of violent conflict in a multitude of neighboring countries, which we have otherwise steered clear of militarily.

After listening to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on his recent swing though the United States I can only assume that Bibi just doesn't realize it's 2011.  How else to explain his repeated comments, including his insulting dressing down of President Barack Obama at the White House, explaining why Israel cannot return to their 1967 borders because Israel would then lack the “strategic depth” to defend itself.  Strategic depth?  Why?

Soon after President Barack Obama announced the death of terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden late Sunday night, a crowd began to gather outside of the White House. At first it was small group of a few dozen people, perhaps the amount you would expect on the streets of Washington DC at midnight on a Sunday. But soon their numbers swelled into the thousands, united in a joyous celebration that the symbol of evil that had haunted the American psyche for a decade was no more. Similar celebrations broke out in New York City - site of the worst portion of Bin Laden’s  9/11 attacks - Los Angeles and other American cities as well.

At the time it seemed like an act of cynical political calculation and a sign of his wavering commitment to human rights: President Obama's decision last fall to suspend the enforcement of a new law that would halt military aid to a handful of nations that employ child soldiers; but in light of the ongoing situation in Egypt, perhaps there's evidence that the criticism was unwarranted.